Opera singer as music muse? Nothing new. Opera singer as art muse? Much cooler.
On the 100th birth year anniversary of the late Milanese artist, Piero Fornasetti, Milan's coordinated a centenary retrospective with more than 1,000 objects at the Triennale. A prolific artist, Fornasetti's most iconic work reappropriated Italian soprano Lina Cavalieri's portrait onto objet d'art like plates, above.
According to Fornasetti's son, Barnaba, Piero discovered the 20th century soprano's image in the 1930s in a magazine and was charmed by her perfectly-proportioned face.
(Lina Cavalieri)
“There’s just something magical in the expression in Cavalieri’s eyes,” he [Barnaba] suggests. Growing up surrounded by her face, he wasn’t terribly interested in who she was. “I never asked my father about her,” he explains, “For a long time, I didn’t know her name.” It wasn’t until later in life, when he started to read about Cavalieri, that he developed his own interest. “One day I’d like to make a movie or an opera about her. She was like a rock star.”
OC checked out the Milan exhibition this weekend, and in addition to Cavalieri, opera showed up frequently in Fornasetti's pieces.
(Trays painted with Teatro alla Scala interior and exterior)
And as we were watching the Russian docu-dramz on Anna Netrebko, we noticed that she's got a few Fornasetti plates in her UWS aparment